Starting Out With SEO
Jun 7th, 07 | 5 remarksAs I learn more about search engine optimization, I’m discovering some recurring fundamental truths:
- SEO requires patience and a lot of experimentation
- SEO is very time consuming
- SEO is difficult to test and measure effectively
This applies to the average website owner, and not the experts I suppose. There are people in the industry who have made it their life’s work to understand and harness the power of search engine optimization. I’m not one of them, but I have learned a thing or two from my time on the web. :) If you’re struggling to make sense of this vast topic too, try some of the following…
Utilize the tools available
Adding a tag or keyword based plugin to your admin will help (and remind) you optimize. This is preferential to blogs, specifically those running Wordpress, but a plugin such as All In One SEO Pack is a very good start. With it, you can add a title and keywords to individual posts from within the Write Post admin panel. You can also tailor meta information regarding your site overall, such as title, description and keywords. Ultimate Tag Warrior is also very popular, and used in conjunction with the SEO Pack, quite beneficial. Jerome’s Keywords is worth a mention too (though it’s redundant if you use the other two plugins).
Make small changes
The search engines are very secretive about their indexing frequencies, and trying to pinpoint an exact schedule is impossible. We may never know just when or how often Google and others crawl our sites, but we can exert some control by making only bite-size changes to our ad arrangements, keywords, or product line presentations, to better measure the results. In other words, don’t change everything all at once, because then you have no frame of reference for seeing which changes are effective.
Track Your Efforts
Get your hands on a good tool for monitoring and analyzing your stats (incoming traffic, clicks, exiting traffic, etc). You might be wondering what that has to do with SEO, but knowing where your traffic is going, where it’s coming from and how people are interacting with your site will help you determine which keywords are performing, which ones aren’t; which pages or posts are receiving the highest views and/or CTR, and which ones are a flop. Being armed with this information can make a difference in how you decide to organize your content, ads, product pages, and so forth.
There you have it - a (very brief) guide to starting out with SEO. For some fast and easy ways to optimize, take a peek at my article 5 Simple Steps for Improving SEO.
Much like most bloggers I don’t know much about SEO stuff. So thanks for the heads up. I’ve heard about the plugins that you’ve listed but I don’t think that I’ve installed them yet. :)
Jun 7, 07 | 5:30 pmI’m glad my post could strengthen your will to create great themes! (referring to the post I wrote on DailyBlogTips the other day…) Thanks for making me feel good about the post :)
And great thoughts on SEO. It’s amazing how much some webbies know about SEO (the _bad_ kind) almost intuitively and not about the _right_ kind. Makes sense, I guess, since the right kind takes work. Go figure.
BTW, I wrote something a little while back about setting up Google Analytics on Wordpress.
http://themeplayground.com/65/how-to-install-google-analytics-on-your-wordpress-blog
(Hope that didn’t seem out of place, just seemed relevant)
Have a good one!
Jun 7, 07 | 8:41 pmDaniel - glad to be of some help! I’ve been using UTW forever and I love it. The only drawback is if you’ve been writing on your blog for a long time and have acquired a large number of posts which you then have to go back through and add tags to… but it’s totally worth it.
Ryan - no problem and no worries. I think it’s great when people add relevant links to a discussion. I only get annoyed when it’s an obvious ploy to draw readers away just to try and sell them something. Those comments get chucked if Akismet doesn’t catch ‘em! ;) Cheers!
Jun 7, 07 | 9:19 pmHi
Jun 8, 07 | 5:18 amWhen I started blogging with wordpress I didn’t realise you could set your titles to be search engine friendly in browsers, so all mine were date based. I found a plugin called Dean’s Permalink Migration which lets you change the structure of these without breaking your old links or changing your page rank.
I’m glad you mentioned that Tara. I’ve been wondering lately if I should change my permalink structure to include the category names. I’ve heard it’s good because they serve as an additional keyword for the SEs. I’ve been hesitant to go through with it though.
I have not established any pagerank yet (still trying to figure that one out), but I was worried about backlinks. I’ll be checking that plugin out - thanks. :)
Jun 8, 07 | 8:43 am